Dreadful: The Short Life and Gay Times of John Horne Burns

by David Margolick

“In many respects, it’s done me good—the loneliness, the homesickness, the contact (if not with bullets and foxholes) with the misery of a very sick world.” His mother had put her finger on it: “I think I have more compassion and tenderness.” A new world had opened up to him: “I’m fond of characters here that I could never have talked to as a civilian,” he wrote his mother. “The things that used to enchain me: wit, perception, kultchah—no longer seem to matter much; they’re an accident of birth and money. The closest friendships here—and at the beach-head—are founded in tenderness, sacrifice, courage, humor, kindness.” He’d gone abroad as what he’d always been—“a very clever boy, attractive when he chose to be, palming off beautiful manners for a lack of heart.” But at some point, he wrote, “I became aware that there are millions of other people in the world, and that really they’re very much like me.” No longer, he vowed, would he live on a “beautiful little peninsula all my own.”